[Dawn] Punjabi has ranked second after Mandarin among the non-official languages, spoken predominately at home, by the largest number of people in Canada, new census data released by Statistics Canada has revealed.
The 2021 census, released on August 18, found that 4.6 million Canadians speak predominantly a language other than official English or French languages at home, among them Urdu has become the fifth top language in the ranking of 12 spoken languages in Canada.
The number of people whose mother tongue is Mandarin or Punjabi, the two most spoken languages nationwide, has grown significantly, with the former increasing from roughly 610,000 in 2016 to 730,000 in 2021 and the latter increasing from 543,000 to 763,000. The Punjabis counted in the census have come mainly from India, speaking gormukhii Punjabi. |